In February 1945, with the 5 July implementation of Great Britain's new National Health Services Act still months away, Aneurin Bevan, Labour's minister of health, wasted no time challenging the opposition. Bevan believed that doctors and dentists receiving a salary equivalent to $1,200 a year plus $3 per patient for participating in the National Health Service were being fairly rewarded for their services. He wasn't about to shed tears on their behalf; nor was he willing let his Conservative opponents undermine Labour's achievement. Responding to the Conservative party's RA Butler, who declared the health programme a "great danger", Bevan insisted that the diehard opponents of National Health had "poisoned" parliamentary debate and, in the wake of their defeat, were engaged in a "squalid political conspiracy."

Sixty-five year later, the Obama administration could use an American Aneurin Bevan. The provisions of the healthcare bill that went into effect last week hold out great benefits for a broad cross-section of Americans. They should be a cause for celebration. Insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions. Preventive procedures, such as colonoscopies and mammograms, must be covered without co-payments, and children under 26 may now be covered under their parents' insurance policies.

But on the day healthcare reform went into effect, there was no dancing in the streets by Democrats and the Obama administration. They seemed almost embarrassed by their accomplishment. The day before, the president had quietly travelled to Falls Church, Virginia, to listen to stories from patients who will be helped by the new healthcare bill. But otherwise, he and the Democrats were silent and seem determined to remain so. In this fall's campaign, no Democrats are expected to be running ads promoting their vote for healthcare legislation.

By contrast, Republicans are openly running against healthcare reform. They believe that by chipping away at the bill congress passed, they can make big gains in the 2010 house and senate elections. On the day provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act went into effect, Republicans dominated television news coverage by unveiling their "Pledge to America", which has as its centerpiece retaining the Bush tax cuts for couples earning more than $250,000 a year and individuals earning more than $200,000, and will add nearly $700bn more to the national debt that the Obama administration's proposals.

In their silence on healthcare reform, it is hard to imagine a surer Democratic strategy for electoral defeat. At a time when 50.7m Americans lack health insurance, a figure that marks a 10% rise for 2009, Democrats are running away from their most important legislative achievement of the last two years.

Never have today's Democrats had more need for someone with the backbone of an Aneurin Bevan. The good news is that if Democrats don't want to look to England and its post-second world war battle for national healthcare, they always have the example of President Franklin Roosevelt. Faced with criticism from a Scrooge-like Republican party during the Depression, FDR was as outspoken as Bevan on what a governing party should do during hard times.

Speaking before an overflow crowd at Madison Square Garden on the eve of the 1936 election, Roosevelt reminded his listeners that he had kept faith with those who first elected him. For anyone who doubted the political ground on which his administration stood, Roosevelt had an answer that left no room for ambiguity:

"Your government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side."